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The Clinton Legacy:
Rule or Ruin

By

Robert L. Bartley

Updated Dec. 4, 2000 12:39 a.m. ET

W ith its unerring sense of drama, fate has provided the perfect capstone for the Clinton Presidency. We always should have known the Clinton legacy would be rule-or-ruin politics, as now waged in Florida by his putative successor.

The Florida words may be new, but the melody is hauntingly familiar. Doesn't "dimpled chad" sound a lot like "what the meaning of 'is' is"? An official trying to do her duty, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, is smeared as "partisan," just as Whitewater investigator...